The end of criminalisation
A man from Belfast sues in Strasbourg and wins. The result: Northern Ireland lifts its ban on gay men in 1982.
On 8 December 1982, an inconspicuous order comes into force in Northern Ireland that gay men there have long been waiting for. With the Homosexual Offences (Northern Ireland) Order, consensual sexual acts between adult men in private are no longer a crime. In England and Wales this had already been the case for fifteen years. Northern Ireland was the last part of the United Kingdom where the old ban still existed.
The reasons it took so long were political. In the seventies, activists in Belfast founded the Northern Ireland Gay Rights Association. Their appeals to the government in London fell on deaf ears, because none of the twelve Northern Irish MPs at Westminster wanted to back a reform. There was also loud opposition from the pulpit: the preacher Ian Paisley launched the campaign "Save Ulster from Sodomy", which some seventy thousand people joined. London dropped the plans in 1979.
The way forward therefore led through Strasbourg. Jeffrey Dudgeon, a shipping clerk in Belfast and one of the leading figures of the movement, had been questioned for hours about his intimate life after a police raid. He was never charged. Nevertheless, he took his case to the European human rights bodies. In 1981, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in his favour. The ban violated his right to respect for private life, even if no criminal proceedings ever followed.
Britain had to act. The reform was half-hearted, however. The age of consent for men was set at twenty-one, much higher than for heterosexual couples. It was not equalised until almost two decades later.
The ruling had an impact far beyond Northern Ireland. It became a precedent for all of Europe and in 2003 even served as a reference point for the US Supreme Court when it struck down the country's last sodomy laws.